Obama to Appeal to Israelis in Trip

By

Colleen McCain Nelson

March 17, 2013 9:10 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama is preparing for a trip to the Middle East this week that has been purposefully cloaked in low expectations.

White House officials have worked to hold down hopes for Mr. Obama's first foreign trip of his second term, making clear that the president's objective is to deliver a message to the Israeli people—not to present any concrete proposal to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Mr. Obama, in efforts to push peace talks, has had a fractious relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who on Sunday continued to piece together his new government by appointing a hard-line former military chief, Moshe Yaalon, as Israel's new defense minister.

Mideast Voyage

Mr. Obama's itinerary this week

March 19Mr. Obama travels overnight to Israel.

March 20He meets in Israel with President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

March 21He meets with President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad of the Palestinian Authority.

March 22Mr. Obama meets with King Abdullah II of Jordan.

March 23Returns to U.S.

Source: White House

Mr. Obama will meet Mr. Netanyahu and other leaders across the region, but administration officials see public appeals as a way to build rapport and stoke public pressure for the peace process. With that in mind, Mr. Obama will bypass the Knesset, Israeli's Parliament, and instead will speak to thousands of young Israelis at Jerusalem's convention center.

Mr. Obama's schedule, heavy on symbolism, is also part of his message to the Israeli public. He plans to lay a wreath at the grave of Theodor Herzl, considered the father of modern Zionism. He will view the Dead Sea Scrolls, which point to an ancient Jewish link to Israel, and he will inspect an Iron Dome battery, a missile-defense system that Israel set up with U.S. help.

Those stops also will resonate in the U.S., where Mr. Obama's visit has a political dimension. He faced criticism last year from Republicans who questioned why he hadn't yet visited Israel as president. Mr. Obama traveled there as a candidate in 2008.

But some Republicans said that simply showing up now isn't sufficient.

"What Republicans are looking for is: What's the outcome?" said David Winston, a Republican strategist. "If it ends up being a photo-op…then that's equally frustrating as not going."

Not all recent presidents have traveled to Israel while in office. George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan didn't do so, and George W. Bush waited until the last year of his second term, when he visited twice.

Michael Oren, Israel's Ambassador to the U.S., said Mr. Obama can build trust with Israelis by asserting an unbreakable alliance between the U.S. and Israel. "Once he comes and establishes that personal rapport with the people of Israel, Israel will be reassured," Mr. Oren said. "Their fears will be allayed and that's the primary goal of the trip."

In Israel, though, Mr. Obama will be greeted by a somewhat skeptical public and a prime minister who appeared to show preference to the president's Republican opponent during last year's campaign. The trip gives Mr. Obama a chance to thaw relations with Mr. Netanyahu and to discuss the Syrian civil war and Iran's nuclear program.

Still, administration officials see the trip as a chance not to close a deal, but to improve communication. Iran's nuclear program will loom large during this visit to the Middle East, but Mr. Obama appeared to push back against expectations of pre-emptive action, telling Israel's Channel 2 television last week that it would take Iran a year or more to develop a nuclear weapon.

Israeli officials have said the critical moment could come this summer, when it may be too late to halt apparent progress toward an Iranian nuclear bomb. Tehran has denied it is pursuing such a goal.

Veterans of Republican administrations agreed that Mr. Obama should cultivate the Israeli public.

"There are things that they need to hear from him to re-establish the tie between an American president and the Israeli people," Stephen Hadley, who was national security advisor to George W. Bush, said on ABC's "This Week."

Mr. Obama himself has worked to manage expectations in White House meetings in recent days with Jewish organizations and Arab-American groups.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the pro-Israel lobbying group J Street, was among U.S. leaders who met with Mr. Obama. Mr. Ben-Ami said that, beyond confirming U.S. support for Israel, Mr. Obama should explain that Israel is not presently on a path to security and should ask what sacrifices Israelis are willing to make for peace.

While the president is wooing Israelis, he also has work to do with Arabs. David Warren, president of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, said he told Mr. Obama last week that many Arab-Americans are disappointed that he hasn't taken a more active role in the long-snarled peace process.

Many point to Mr. Obama's 2009 speech in Cairo as a pivotal moment that set high hopes.

Marwan Muasher, a vice president at the Carnegie Endowment and a former deputy prime minister of Jordan, said Mr. Obama wasted an opportunity after Cairo by failing to follow through and instead taking an incremental approach to the peace process.

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